Horizon - What is Reality?

Ancient Greek philosophers like Parmenides, Zeno and Plato stumbled upon a radical discovery: the distinction between appearance and reality. If we are to ask the question of what reality is (and how we can know this), our best bet at finding some sort of answer would require that we delve deeply into science, mathematics and philosophy.

The following documentary explores some of the questions that are currently at the border between scientific inquiry and philosophical speculation: What are the basic constituents of the universe? How does quantum mechanics make sense? What's up with the double-slit experiment? Is mathematics the language in which the laws of the physical universe are written, or is the universe actually part of a mathematical structure? Do we live in a multi-dimensional universe, or are we simply the holographic projection of information forever trapped in the event horizon of some supermassive black hole? And why can't a guy get a date on a Saturday night? :)

I think the pony tail might help explain the mystery of the last question :)

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Weiner Gives "Half-Time Report" in Debate over Healthcare Repeal

Yes, I may be on a bit of a ranting spree, but I'd rather end the week on a positive note instead of one that just makes me more upset than I already am. Hopefully you feel the same way.

So, what we have now is Congressman Anthony Weiner adeptly summarizing the nature of the shady strategies used by Republicans trying to repeal the notion that American citizens should have access to health coverage. Sure, it may be fun to mock the Republicans, but what Weiner's powerful speech does is focus the debate back to the real issues instead of all the distractions and scare tactics. This is one dude who's not fooled by the conservative prestidigitation.

What I still don't get is how people let themselves be fooled against their own interests so easily...
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Another Teabagging Bimbo Flunks American History

Did I miss something here? Has it become official policy for teabagging conservatives (like Michelle Bachmann this time) to either distort or be ignorant of basic American history? I can understand if ordinary Americans don't really know their own history, but those who run for office and feel themselves qualified to make decisions for the rest of us should really get an education (based on facts, not on what fantasies Glenn Beck and other douchebags make) before they start pontificating and making complete asses of themselves.

And if they really do know their history, and still make these assertions, I'm not sure they could escape the condemnation of racism and bigotry that's already associated with them.

I know these people are obsessed with wanting to seem patriotic, but loving your country doesn't mean being in denial about its past blunders; it means doing your best to overcome that shady past and turn the country into the ideal you'd like it to be.

Anderson Cooper may have been pwned by a bonobo, but he won't be fooled by Bachmann, and that probably tells you something about the difference in intelligence levels we're dealing with here...

And how come all the hotties happen to be Republican and dumber than a retarded dodo bird? My penis is getting really confused here!
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Sarah Palin - Petty Woman

In these difficult times, I do have to thank teabaggers for providing an easy outlet to vent some frustration :)



I don't know whether you agreed with my assessment of Sarah Palin's sleazy use of special pleading and double standards when it comes to the issue of criticizing her vs criticizing her opponents, but it seems that Jon Stewart did...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Petty Woman
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

With that kind of pettiness, I wouldn't be surprised if she joins the cast of Jersey Shore soon. Watch out, Snookie, your days may be numbered...

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Thank You!

Dear readers: While taking a break from this blog, and as I've been trying to figure out how to deal with some recent personal problems, I've received many words of support and encouragement from good friends, former students and regular readers of this blog, including many I've never met.

So, I wanted to say thanks to all of you for your support. It really means a lot to me that there are people out there who care. Who needs invisible gods when there is real flesh and blood to create communities of warm support? :)

As I continue to struggle through these difficult times, I will start to blog again, but I do expect my entries to be sporadic, intermittent and random for a while. And in all likelihood, I imagine that I may also use some of them to vent some anger and frustration, so please bear with me.

And again, thank you!
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Blog Hiatus

As you probably surmise, dear readers, this blog is a product of love. I firmly believe that exposing others to interesting, challenging and diverse ideas might just be the spark that can inspire someone to pursue any of these questions in more depth. And my sincere hope is that the Philosophy Monkey blog may create even the smallest difference for a better and more educated world.

And while I love blogging and sharing with all of you, I've recently been dealt a heavy personal blow whose impact is simply making it impossible for me to sleep or concentrate on anything else. I am announcing, therefore, that I will be taking a break from this blog until I can get my life back in order.

I don't know when I'll be back, but if you subscribe to this blog through email, facebook or an rss feed, you'll be notified the next time there is a new entry.

In the meantime, I would like to thank to all the people who visit regularly. Seeing the number of hits this page receives daily, even though it's a one-man operation from a nobody in a dark corner of the world, is always an inspiration to continue sharing good stuff.
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Sarah Palin's Blood Libel

If you were Sarah Palin, and you were confronted with the fact that the one-sided, delusional, bigoted and inflammatory rhetoric of your speeches (as well as your overt political tactics) may have influenced a deranged lunatic to go on a shooting spree (that left many dead and wounded as he tried to off Arizona's first Jewish congresswoman), and you wanted to wash your hands from the affair instead of taking some responsibility for your role (after all, didn't she once urge liberals to 'man up'?), what would you do?

I'm pretty sure I know what you wouldn't do: you wouldn't use anti-semitic expressions to describe how the media is portraying your role in this fiasco that resulted in the near-death of... drum-roll please... a Jew. Oy vey...

Then again, you are not Sarah Palin, so you wouldn't make that kind of dumbass mistake. Sadly, Sarah Palin is Sarah Palin (oh, curse of curses), and when you're that stupid, you're probably too stupid to hire ghost writers who are smart enough to write your stupid speeches for you... just look at your twitter account for lots of examples, Ms. Refudiate Blood Libel...

But here is the weird thing: ignoring all the false claims, bad logic, distorted history and politicized rhetoric in her address, she does manage to make a number of sensible points...

I know! I fell off my chair too!

But here's the thing: it's not enough to say reasonable things only when you're pressed against the wall and you have to face the consequences of your own actions. It's true we shouldn't vilify our opponents simply because we disagree with them, but that also means that you don't get to do it either! If you want everyone to abide by the rules of reasonable discourse, you gotta play by the same rules as well. You can't expect everyone to play by the rules while you get to do whatever the hell you want.

So, when some liberal wants to guarantee access to medical healthcare for all Americans, don't go spouting incendiary claims about 'death panels.'

When your opponent has briefly found himself in the same committee as someone with a shady past, you don't get to call him a terrorist.

When someone wants to give the poor some relief by taxing the rich a little more, you don't get to call that person a socialist, as if socialism were even a bad thing...

When someone argues that maybe semi-automatic weapons are not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment, you don't get to call them unpatriotic traitors who hate America and who want to take our guns.

When someone in the media asks you a question you can't answer because you haven't done your homework, you don't get to dismiss them by calling them the lame stream media conspiracy, especially when you get your paychecks from the mainstream media!


And when you want to eliminate your political competition, either don't target them with sniper rifle crosshairs and incite lunatics to violence, or if you do, don't be bitching when someone does your bidding and the country expects you to take some fucking responsibility!

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The Flying Spaghetti Monster Song

Rise, Pastafarians!

Let yourselves be touched by the Flying Spaguetti Monster's noodly appendage... and feel the power of his balls!

Say it with me, brothers and sisters, Pasta-halleluja!

And if he weren't real, would he really make random appearances all over the world?

RAmen... :)
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Barry Schwarts on Aristotle and Practical Wisdom

In his famous Nicomachean Ethics, the ancient philosopher Aristotle argued that ethics is not an exact science, and that looking for mathematical precision in such a discipline is bound both to fail and to distort ethics itself.

Instead of thinking of ethical principles as rules that everyone ought to follow categorically, as more modern philosophers have argued, Aristotle was deeply concerned with the role of judgment and flexibility in our moral assessments. Aristotle's concern was not with rules (or misguided incentives) but with character and virtue. Since ethics for Aristotle is about living a good life (and not just blindly following a set of maxims or working for the sake of bonuses), different circumstances may require that our choices vary accordingly, and deciding what to do will require that we apply some practical wisdom to our endeavors.

In the following thought-provoking TEDTalk presentation, and using a number of powerful examples, Barry Schwartz makes a very compelling case for the many ways in which a return to Aristotle and virtue ethics may just literally save the world and help us see again what really matters.

Check out more on the awesomeness of Aristotle.
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John Stuart Mill's Methods of Induction

If you're familiar with the name, then you probably know that the 19th century British philosopher John Stuart Mill is primarily famous for his work on the ethical theory of utilitarianism. What you may not know, however, is that this young and prolific genius also did some important and sophisticated work in logic and the philosophy of science trying to solve Hume's famous problem of induction.

You may have heard scientists sometimes refer to 'the laws of nature.' The problem of induction is that we never directly experience these 'laws': all we seem to experience is the constant conjunction of certain circumstances with certain events. To talk about a cause-effect relationship between two events, however, seems to require more than just a mere conjunction (which, for all we know, might be entirely coincidental and fortuitous). In short, part of the conceptual problem is that science is supposed to be an empirical enterprise, grounded in experience. But experience is always of particular events. So if our experience is only of particular events, and never of the laws of nature themselves, how can we rationally engage in any meaningful discourse about general laws and principles? This, incidentally, is one of the reasons why scientists sometimes don't like philosophers :)

But here's where John Stuart Mill comes in: he developed, classified and formalized a set of methods for testing causal hypotheses (thereby going beyond mere generalizations from few to many or from past to future). As in all cases of induction, though we may never be able to develop a proof based on logical necessity (the way mathematicians and logicians are used to), science can nevertheless make progress by testing hypotheses: any hypothesis that survives the day gets to make it to the next round. Those that are eliminated are discarded and no more neural energy is wasted on them (ideally).

Anyway, the following is a slideshow presentation I've been working on, summarizing these methods. It's a bit heavy on text to help anyone who may want to use it without having to sit in one of my classes and hear me yap about these ideas :)

The show is best viewed in full-screen mode. Once you start it, just click the right arrow on your keyboard to move through the animations and the slides (don't use your mouse to click on the 'next slide' button or you'll miss important sections of the presentation).

And if you want a short and thought-provoking introduction to Utilitarianism, check out Harvard Professor Michael Sandel's fascinating lectures on Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

Disclaimer: The slideshow is based on the eleventh edition of Copi and Cohen's "Introduction to Logic," so the credit should really go to them.

You may also be interested in my slideshow presentation on logical fallacies.

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Bill O'Reilly Proves God's Existence?

It kind of sucks when some of us spend years of rigorous disciplined training and research trying to understand the nature of reality only to be one-upped by the supernatural theo-philosophical powers of pundits like Bill O'Reilly.

As part of this ongoing and silly billboard battle between Christians and atheists, Papa Bear dropped the following version of the bombshell god-of-the-gaps argument on atheists. And here I thought the argument proved the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster...

Stephen Colbert and Neil DeGrasse Tyson discuss the incredible implications:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bill O'Reilly Proves God's Existence - Neil deGrasse Tyson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> Video Archive

Kneel before Neil! :)

Update: Papa Bear fights back:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Crisis in Egypt - Anderson Cooper & Bill O'Reilly<a>
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> Video Archive

The stupid... it hurts!!!
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Hans Rosling - The Joy of Stats

If there were a prize for the geekiest and most adorable intellectuals out there, Hans Rosling would surely be in the lead. He's the kind of guy from whom you want to learn and whose cheeks you want to pinch :)

It is no surprise, therefore, that the BBC partnered up with him to produce a fascinating and amusing documentary about the history, importance and influence of statistical analysis.

If you think statistics sounds boring, that's probably because you've never seen them come to life, but that's about to change as you see how this humble discipline has the potential to revolutionize the world, and even the way science is done, a few times over.

Check out more documentaries, more entries on math or just tons of awesome animations.
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Neuroscience and Free Will

As a world-renowned mathematician, Professor Marcus Du Sautoy is well aware of bombshell ideas that have devastating conceptual power such as Godel's Incompleteness Theorem or Russell's Paradox. These ideas, of course, are not merely mathematical curiosities: they have powerful philosophical implications about the nature of universals, logic and the limits of thought and cognition.

All his mathematico/philosophical training, however, could not prepare him for the existential confrontation with one of the deepest philosophical questions regarding what it is to be human: free will. Challenging abstract concepts are one thing... lived experience, as one might expect, is a bit more visceral :)

The problem is not simply that free will is most likely an illusion. Today's technological advances in neuroimaging and brain scanning present a modern-day version of LaPlace's demon: other people may know what choice you are going to make before you yourself are aware your own 'choice'...

And here is a bit more from Susan Greenfield on these types of experiments:

Haynes' interpretation didn't quite convince me (I don't assume mind-brain identity, even though I am a physicalist), but you get the point anyway...
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Barack Obama is Luke Skywalker?

The holiday break seems to have renewed the already funny juices of the writers at The Daily Show, which they have now combined with their geeky juices into a hilarious montage about the recent political adventures of Barack Obama:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Barack Obama Is Luke Skywalker
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

I hope Stevie Wonder didn't see that... oh wait... :)

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Super Monkey Collider Loses Funding

Though the longitudinal study on whether multiple stab wounds may be harmful to monkeys is not yet complete, The Onion reports that the economic crisis is forcing politicians to cut funding in other areas of curiosity-based research, such as CERN's Large Monkey Collider.

At least the scientists did manage to discover cheesium before the funding was cut :)
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The Genius of Britain - Episode 3

After exploring the birth of the scientific revolution as it took place in England, and tracing the consequences of that revolution as they manifested in and helped fuel the industrial revolution, today's episode of this fascinating documentary series explores the men behind some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 19th century.

First up is the all-too-likable Michael Faraday, that man of humble origins who would rise to scientific fame through his ingenuity and the precision and creativity of his experiments, especially those he conducted on electromagnetism. Without his contributions, the world would be literally dark at night, so he's kind of a big deal.

Richard Dawkins recounts the story of a great neglected hero of his: Alfred Russel Wallace, the man who thought up the theory of evolution through natural selection independently of Darwin, and who would consequently stimulate the latter to finally publish all the work he'd kept secret for about twenty years. Like Faraday, Wallace also turned out to be a super nice guy... unlike that other British dick embroiled in a priority dispute over the invention of the calculus: Newton :)

The next two men in our story dreamed of developing faster communication between Europe and America through what would become the Transatlantic cable. William Thomson (mainly famous for his work on thermodynamics) would develop the theory and the engineering required to produce a workable cable, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel would develop the theory of fluid motion that would then allow him to create the ship capable of carrying and laying said cable. Brunel did not live to see his dream realized, but when the mission finally succeeded, Thomson became Lord Kelvin.

Finally, Jim Al-Khalili introduces the incredible and curious genius of James Clerk Maxwell, arguably the man whose intellectual contributions were the most important contributing factor for inspiring Einstein to develop his theory of special relativity.

If the book of Genesis had said this:


or even "wash your hands," I'd totally be a believer :)
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